


Microcosm

by tripwirealarm



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Fluff, for TimePetalsPrompts Pay-It-Forward Promo on Tumblr
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-29
Updated: 2015-09-29
Packaged: 2018-04-24 00:34:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,697
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4898722
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tripwirealarm/pseuds/tripwirealarm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Doctor and Rose visit an art museum in the parallel universe. For TimePetalsPrompts' Pay-It-Forward promo on Tumblr, at the request of tumblr user heartbreakingtennant, Tentoo/Rose fluff.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Microcosm

It’s the small things that throw him.  

If material space were an ocean, this universe would be a tidepool, separately contained within itself, liberated long ago from external influence at a branching off point he still can’t quite identify.  He can say with some certainty that it’s sometime during the Franco-Prussian War, which isn’t to say it’s because of the Franco-Prussian War or even related.  It’s something small, unremarkable, mundane even, and correlation does not imply causation.  It’s chaos theory, interpolated cause and effect between fixed events; it’s only logical that there are multitudes of deviations as yet unchronicled.  Undiscovered.  His whole life has been pitched on the concept of experiencing something completely new, and here he is, day after day in a tidepool of evolved deviations and occasionally, it’s still something of a shock when one confronts him so casually: like the _Gallerie dell’Accademia_ being inexplicably built on the north bank of the Grand Canal in Venice, rather than the south.

It’s small, of little consequence.  And Rose, who has never been to Venice in any universe, doesn’t notice and, after a moment of adjusting, he doesn’t mention it.

They wander the travertine corridors with the same unhurried curiosity they would adopt on a rocky moon of Jupiter.  Past pre-Raphaelite triptychs of wise men and robed figures with gold-leaf halo-crowns, Michelangelo’s David, there it is: on special display from the _gabinetto dei disegni e stampe_ , Da Vinci’s _Vitruvian Man_.

It’s always been his favorite; bodies ago he’d had the chance to meet Da Vinci and demurred.  Never meet your heroes.  It’s only now he’s regretting it.  He’d thought at the time that there was no need to rush, there would be any number of chances.  There was no harm in visiting historical figures determined as dead so long as they weren’t cemented into events correlating with his own personal timeline.  It’s a quirk of time travel as seen through a quantum lens: retroactive entanglement and the observer effect.  To a Time Lord, everyone encountered is dead at some varied endpoint of their collective potential lives.  He’ll think about it later.

“So, what am I looking at here?” Rose’s elbow nudges his ribcage while she turns a smile on him.  “I’ve seen it loads of times but not with you here to give me the spiel.”

“Well,” the Doctor says, “ _The Vitruvian Man_ , one of Da Vinci’s most famous attempts to relate man to nature, using the methodology of proportion as described by ancient Roman architect Vitruvius.”

After a long moment, gazing into the specially lighted glass cabinet displaying the flimsy, aged paper, Rose insinuates her hand into his, their fingers basket woven together in the humming, marble-hall silence.  

Then she laughs. “This is where you say, ‘You want to meet him, Rose?’”

“Which one? Da Vinci or Vitruvius?”

“Dunno.  Which one would be more interesting?”

“Oh,” he says, voice dropped low into his throat, “ _Da Vinci_ ”, brow immediately furrowed, almost as though it’s insulting to consider any alternative.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” he confirms airly.  “No contest. Vitruvius was a scholar, mainly a codifier.  Architecture, architectural concepts. Former military, straight laced as they come. Nothing so diverse as Da Vinci.  Oh, the epitome of the Renaissance man!  Painting, music, science, maths, engineering, anatomy, astronomy, botany! ‘I love those who can smile in trouble,’ he said once.  Nothing he couldn’t do, _nothing_.  An absolute genius, stone cold genius.”

“Blimey, don’t be shy, Doctor.”

He rotates toward her, bumping shoulders, and then foreheads, when he bends forward.  “You want to meet him, Rose?”

She’s too close to see properly, but somewhere in the blur of skin and shadow there’s a flash of teeth and a subdued grin.  “I dunno. Reckon you might embarrass me by gushing and pleading for an autograph and end up getting Renaissance Florence invaded by giant lavender mollusks from the planet Clom.”

“Oooh, well done.”

“Yeah?”

“Giant mollusks, Renaissance Florence, brilliant attention to detail this time.  And Clom!  Haven’t thought of Clom in _years_!”  He pulls the last word out through his bottom teeth before continuing with a squint in her direction. “But I have to say, negative points for my supposed pleading for an autograph.”

“You say that as though you wouldn’t.”

They exchange a small, only vaguely bittersweet smile before Rose turns her eyes back to _The Vitruvian Man_ encased in a shallow panel of light-shielding glass.  This is a game they play with each other, imagined adventures on other planets, fantastic run-ins with historical figures and increasingly unlikely alien conflicts.  Not the sort of thing they often run up against these days; even consulting for Pete, it’s more negotiations of diplomatic immunity for unregistered races and monthly technological advances that, without the Doctor, would have eluded this parallel Earth for another hundred-fifty years, than it is running from giant mollusks with DaVinci.  But they have their own brand of adventures, their own discoveries, their own sort of new world.

She’s quiet a moment, and he can nearly hear the shuffle of all the things she chooses not to say.  Whether he’d ever met him before, or had the chance, what happened and when, and the perilous question of whether _The Vitruvian Man_ is different in this universe.  

It is.  Parallel DaVinci had a little heavier hand than Prime DaVinci.  Nothing to get upset over. If Rose notices, she doesn’t bother to bring it up.  They’re long past mourning the imperfections of chance or providence.

“So what’s he on about, comparing buildings and people?  Always thought he was just a painter.”  She seems to bite back a teasing smirk, and one corner of his mouth tightens distastefully.  

“‘ _Just a painter_.’  No, no, he’s not comparing buildings to people so much as saying it’s why architecture works at all.  It’s because it’s constructed fundamentally the same as a human body, and even that, not just human, I’ll remind you.”

“Yeah?  I don’t remember Daleks looking like they’re built to look like anything but snotty octopus bits.”

“The Daleks,” he reminds her gravely, “Weren’t made by nature.  Even animal and non-bipedal living things adhere to this proportion.  Vitruvius, albeit unknowingly, fleshed out a concept as first demonstrated by the sculptor Phidias, who studied the ratio in pursuit of perfect proportion for statues in the Greek Parthenon. Later on it was discussed by Plato and Euclid, and eventually the ratio was recognized as Phi, for Phidias.  DaVinci’s _Vitruvian Man_ shows what is really a rudimentary golden mean as proportioned, and without question and across the cosmos, it’s been agreed it’s the most binding of all mathematical relationships.”  His eyebrows raise toward his hairline as he concludes by unraveling his fingers from hers and bringing her hand up for her inspection.

“You see,” he says, “how the first joint is longer than the second, and the second is longer than the end joint?  One-point-six times longer, to be exact, just like the legs are one-point-six times longer than the torso, and the torso one-point-six times longer than the head.  The golden section.”

“Leave it to you,” she drawls, wiggling her displayed fingers, “To explain some magical number that connects all things using a _hand_.”

“ _Well_.  DaVinci believed the proportions and workings of the human body to be an analogy for the workings of the universe.  The essential symmetry of the human body, and by extension, the universe as a whole.”  

“When was this, though?  Like hundreds of years ago, yeah? What could they have known about the universe? Like DaVinci, genius that he was, what could he have really known about what’s out there?”

“Admittedly not much, but you can find the universe in small, Earthbound things just as easily as you can find it between the stars.  The face of a sunflower, river systems stretched over continents, the way the cream curls when you pour it in black coffee. Snowflakes, seashells, _DNA_!  The geometry of life! The golden spiral and the Fibonacci sequence, resulting fractal patterns, the Mandelbrot set. The very same ratios that govern plant cell structures and tree branches are the same ones that shape hurricanes, the width and division of planetary ring systems, spiral galaxies.  For someone who takes notice of these microcosms, these little universes, it’s not such a far jump from that to tracking orbits across the night sky, charting moon cycles by candlelight, wondering why you can see the face of the full moon at twilight when the moon is only in crescent phase. DaVinci solved that riddle himself.”  The Doctor shrugs.  “He was wrong about a few things in the process, but he asked the right questions long before most people had any frame of reference.  Sometimes you have to look down before you look up, I suppose.”

Rose’s eyebrows push together.  “Wouldn’t it be frustrating, though? Having all those big questions and ambitions and no way to know the answers? Makes you feel sort of helpless.”

And with her hand still held up as a visual aid, the Doctor bows and presses his lips to the back of her wrist, that bundle of delicate bone and blood vessels branching like tributaries bound tight under the drum of her skin, harboring the gentle twitch of her pulse--a familiar, beloved rhythm.  There may not be giant mollusks or Renaissance Florence, but right here is the cosmos encapsulated in a single body, DaVinci’s metaphorical microcosm with eternity burning gold between her lungs and all the divine symmetry of the small universe that lives under their feet and inside the uncharted hours of every day still to come, the small things and unanswered questions of the future all crowding behind him on the edge of an imagined cliff above a great, yawning height that still leaves him breathless as the anticipation of the undiscovered has always done.

“The right question is always more important the right answer, Rose.”

Her eyes are bright. “Did DaVinci say that?”

“No, _I_ said that.   _DaVinci_ said ‘A well-spent day brings happy sleep.’”  He tucks a smile behind where he still clasps her wrist, and she mirrors it like the sun reflecting off water.

“Pretty smart bloke, your DaVinci.”

“I told you,” he says.  “Stone cold genius.”


End file.
